Food and the City – Retracing London’s Drovers’ Roads

I have a book called Drovers’ Roads of Wales by Fay Godwin and Shirley Toulson published in 1977, which has always fascinated me. “Through the heart of Wales run innumerable centuries-old tracks — many still traceable and open. They are the Drovers’ Roads. For hundreds of years — from the Middle Ages to the victory of the railways around 1900 — they were trodden by tens of thousands of cattle, sheep and even geese being driven — at an average of 2 mph — to the markets of London. The drovers — many of them now Welsh folk legends — avoiding the main roads, walked their flocks through villages, lively market towns, sometimes following Roman and even earlier highways, passing ancient sites and megaliths and through some of the most dramatic landscapes of Wales” as it says on the back cover.